News

Shake Hands With The Devil by Roméo Dallaire

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Failure of Humanity in Rwandaby Roméo Dallaire

Arrow £8.99 pp580

When the killing began on April 7, 1994, Lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian head of the tiny UN military mission in Rwanda, repeatedly had the experience of talking to friends over the phone and then listening while Hutu extremists butchered them and their families with machetes. The standard technique was to start with the children, hacking off their arms and legs and then their genitalia, throwing these into the faces of their horrified watching parents. The children would be left to bleed to death in agony; the parents were generally slaughtered more quickly.

Within a few days, Dallaire was discovering whole churches (where Tutsis and moderate Hutus had fled for refuge) full of their horribly dismembered bodies. In this traumatic and gripping book — indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide